Eight suggestions for facing the transition

Eight suggestions for facing the transition:

1 Don’t do stupid shit. Train your anger to follow your sense of what furthers your goals.

2 Beware of agents provocateurs. Choose your allies according to the ultimate effects of the actions that they advocate.

3 Understand that at this critical juncture, we need to be as clear as we can be about the condition of our liberties and those of our neighbors. We have to distinguish between the harms that have already occurred, and those that we anticipate and fear, but which have not yet been implemented.

4 Ask yourself, is your life is under constant immediate threat? Are you beggared and robbed every day, to the point where it’s nearly impossible to make ends meet? If the answer to these questions is yes, then you are living today in a revolutionary situation, and you can weigh the efficacy of destructive versus non-violent response. If, strictly speaking, the answer is no, then you should resist by all means deliberately and non-violently.

5 Consider that the answer to these questions points towards how the problem of racism has, up till now, divided people who are oppressed by the current economic and political system into two politically opposed camps. 

6 Reject the implicit clientism of the current political configuration in the US. In other words, recognize that after decades of virtually unrestricted corruption of our state and federal legislatures by wealthy corporations and individuals, we have evolved a system, supported by Democrats and Republicans, which perpetuates the continued diversion of wealth towards those who live by investment capital and away from everyone else (disclosure: I am primarily an investor myself). The two parties have profited from this arrangement by effectively dividing the victims of this massive fraud between themselves and against each other. 

7 Build a movement to generate and effect real solutions to the current impasse. If we begin a process, in all fifty states, to convene a new constitutional convention, we will at least create a virtual forum in which new solutions can be raised and broadly debated—and it might actually work. 

8 In this particular sense, all of us are living today in a revolutionary situation. Whether or not our lives and liberties are immediately threatened, our system of representative government has turned away from the careful balance of competing interests that it was designed to perpetuate. We have to repair our system of government by deliberate and possibly long range political action, in spite of the corruption of the present day two party system, starting now. Failing this, by making poor choices or by refusing to seize the initiative, we risk losing everything.